Cognitive biases and persuasion in CRO and copywriting

Cognitive biases, as the recently deceased Daniel Kahneman and later Cialdini demonstrated, are mental actions our brain performs automatically when faced with certain stimuli, without stopping to question whether they are rational.

Obviously, you need to know them if you want to take advantage of them.

There are many: more than 200 are known and have been demonstrated.

And when working in certain disciplines, such as copywriting or CRO, where we work on the minds of our users or customers and try to persuade them, knowing them is absolutely essential.

But of course, since 200 is a lot, in this article —shorter than usual and the second in the CRO series— I’m going to summarise the five most common ones.

So you can understand how to use them on your website or in your materials.

Scarcity or urgency bias

When something is perceived as scarce, we feel afraid we might miss out on it (FOMO, in English), so we speed up the purchase.

Examples:

• Low stock of a product.
• Deadline to receive a bonus for buying a course.
• Or before the price goes up.
• Promotion for the first 10 people.
• …

Pretty clear, right?

Anchoring bias

The first piece of information we receive about something carries more weight in our minds than what comes later. That is why it is used especially with pricing and offers:

If I show you a price at the beginning of your journey and manage to make it seem reasonable, if at the end of the whole process I give you a significant discount, your brain perceives it as a great opportunity and encourages the purchase.

Basically, what teleshopping has been doing forever.

The opposite also happens: showing unexpected costs at the end of the process, such as shipping costs, can stop the purchase.

Authority bias

We give credibility to the opinions of people we trust: experts or reputable brands.

Once you have built that authority, selling becomes much easier.

There are different ways to implement it at every stage of the funnel:

• Advertising on TV (more in the past than now).
• Appearing in the media without paying.
• Being the first Google result.
• Using relevant, well-known influencers.
• …

Reciprocity bias

We tend to feel the need to return favours we receive. A kind of debt is created.

So if a person or brand offers me something I’m interested in in exchange for my email, for example, we see that as fair.

And that explains the number of lead magnets you will see on all kinds of websites.

Consensus and social proof bias

We like to feel part of a whole. If I see someone buying something, we tend to consider it valid.

That is why we are so influenced by the ratings of products and services and the testimonials. Also the success stories from customers or copy with messages such as “215 people bought this product in the last 24h”.

As I said, there are many more biases, but by knowing and applying these in your sales processes, you should already see an increase in your conversion rates.

Conclusion

That’s it for today’s short article. I’ll keep the idea of improving it in future, expanding these descriptions and adding other biases that may be less common but just as useful.

In the meantime…

More about CRO…

Did you like the article?

Well, here you can continue with the rest of the articles in the CRO series:

• What CRO is and the user matrix.

• Cognitive biases and persuasion in CRO and copywriting. This is the one you’re reading.

• The universal CRO principles.

• CRO techniques to improve conversion.

• Tools for CRO.

• Testing methodology for CRO.

• Bonus: What Microsoft Clarity is and how to integrate it with Google Analytics.

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